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Tuesday, August 30, 2011

Reuters, BBC and the Guardian celebrate an anti-semite

From Reuters:

His cartoons are edgy, bold, and a thorn in the side of the Arab world's tottering authoritarians -- a gift to protesters from the unlikely setting of an apartment in beach-side Rio de Janeiro.

Carlos Latuff, a 42-year-old leftist whose only family link to the Middle East is a Lebanese grandfather he never knew, has become a hero of the tumultuous Arab Spring with rapid-fire satirical sketches that have helped inspire the uprisings.

All he has needed is his pen, a passion for the region's struggles and a Twitter account that he uses to send out his cartoons.
Reuters is aping earlier stories by the Guardian and the BBC praising Latuff.

Later on Reuters writes:
Latuff's foray into the divisive world of Middle Eastern politics has made him plenty of enemies as well as friends. His uncompromising work depicting Israeli army brutality toward Palestinians -- one cartoon compares soldiers with Nazi Germans -- has drawn allegations that he is anti-Semitic, a charge he strongly denies.


So according to Reuters the only thing he ever drew that was potentially anti-semitic was one single cartoon that compared Israel to Nazis  (which is prima facie anti-semitic anyway.)

Yet his sickening comparison between Jewish soldiers and Nazis is an obsession with Latuff, a theme he has hammered home many times. There is no iconic representation of the Holocaust that he has not appropriated in his zeal to demonize the Jewish state.

Here are just some of his cartoons on that theme:



















Beyond that, he has touched on some other anti-semitic themes:

The all powerful Jewish lobby, controlling the US.


"Edgy."




Classic Nazi motif of Jew-as-octopus



A modern version of the charge of deicide.


These is not merely "edgy" and "bold." This is hate speech. This is incitement. And this is anti-semitism.

Latuff's cartoons against Arab dictators do not go nearly as far as these do; their imagery is typically more abstract. Although they are pointed, there is no hate; they are more in line with typical political cartoons. No dead children, no Holocaust imagery, nothing close to the vitriol he reserves for the Jewish state:






The only people he ever compares to Nazis are, of course, Jews.

In addition, Latuff has cartoons that lionize terrorists and "armed resistance":




Is this someone who should be praised in the pages of the BBC, the Guardian and Reuters?